The growth in the volume of online transactions conducted by businesses and individuals over the Internet has been staggering. Sensitive, private identity information is typically used for authenticating a user for conducting online transactions. The increased use of identity information for Internet transactions has been accompanied by an increased danger of interception and theft of that information. Identity theft occurs when someone uses the password, username, Social Security number, credit card number, or other identifying personal information of another without consent, to commit fraud. According to a September 2003 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) survey, 27.3 million Americans have been victims of identity theft in a recent five-year period, including 9.9 million people in the year 2002 alone. Identity theft losses to businesses and financial institutions in 2002 totaled nearly $48 billion and consumer victims reported $5 billion in out-of-pocket expenses, according to the FTC survey.
One form of identity theft is perpetrated using a social engineering attack known as “phishing”. Phishing is defined according to the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as the fraudulent acquisition, through deception, of sensitive personal information such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as someone trustworthy with a real need for such information. Phishing fraud schemes typically use a masquerade website to generate email messages made to appear as originating as requests for necessary information from a trusted service provider, e.g., a bank or a merchant. The phishing email messages typically contain links to websites that also appear to belong to the service provider, but, in fact, are used by the “phishers”. The masquerade web site attempts to deceive users into giving up their password or other sensitive personal information.
Another form of identity theft is perpetrated using an attack known as “pharming”. In this type of attack, software solely intended for purposes of crime misdirects innocent users to fraudulent sites or proxy servers, typically through DNS hijacking or poisoning. Pharming is the exploitation of a DNS server software vulnerability that allows a hacker to acquire the Domain Name for a site, and to cause traffic directed to that web site to be redirected to another web site. DNS servers are the machines responsible for resolving Internet names into their real addresses; they function as the “signposts” of the Internet. If the web site receiving the redirected traffic is a fake web site, such as a copy of a bank's website, it can be used to “phish” or steal a computer user's passwords, PIN number, account number and/or other confidential information.
Various other fraudulent means to acquire confidential information entered by a user are known. For example, espionage software including keyboard loggers, mouse click loggers, and screen capture loggers are well-known and used for this purpose. Also, other types of espionage software, such as snoopware, spyware, non-viral malware, hackers utility, surveillance utility and Trojans are well known. As another example, “evil twin” attacks are becoming common. An evil twin is a home-made wireless access point, also known as a “hot spot” that masquerades as a legitimate one to gather personal or corporate information without the end user's knowledge. The attacker positions himself in the vicinity of the access point and lets his computer discover what name and radio frequency the legitimate access point uses. He then sends out his own radio signal on that frequency using the same name. For the purpose of the present invention, espionage software is any software program that aids in the unauthorized acquisition of information, such as information about a person or organization. Espionage software is also typically hidden from the user. Espionage software typically installs itself on a user's computer without consent and then monitors or controls the use of the device. Every user keystroke, all chat conversations, all websites visited, every user interaction with a browser, every application executed, every document printed and all text and images might be captured by the espionage software. Espionage software typically is capable of locally saving, and/or transmitting the captured data to third parties over the Internet, most often without the user's knowledge or consent. The keyboard loggers and mouse click loggers might also take the form of hardware connected between the keyboard/mouse cable and the computer or the hardware inside the keyboard/mouse device.
Another acquirer of confidential, sensitive personal information who uses it for fraud is known as an “over-the-shoulder” spy. This spy surreptitiously reads a user's display to acquire the information, such as alphanumeric or other forms of information. For example, conventional graphical user interfaces that use keypad and/or keyboard images for user data entry are vulnerable also to mouse click loggers, screen capture loggers and other schemes. Each alphanumeric character in the graphical interface is represented by a unique graphical image, e.g., the pixels comprising the number 1. Screen capture loggers utilize optical character recognition (OCR) technology to decipher the mouse clicks and corresponding alphanumeric graphic in order to ascertain the actual alphanumeric text characters of a user's ID and password. Sophisticated screen capture loggers also have the capability to utilize checksum and size characteristics of the graphic images in order to ascertain which identifier alphanumeric character corresponds to each graphic image selected by a user's mouse click during data entry. In these ways, the screen capture loggers may acquire the personal information even when the graphical user interface has rearranged the order of alphanumeric characters on the keypad or keyboard.
Known anti-virus and anti-spyware software products attempt to enable a user to protect against some identity thieves. However, these products are not capable of providing a secure defense to theft because they are inherently reactive. As such they all depend on a signature that is reproducible. They must be updated constantly and are useful only to the extent that they have been updated. They are always vulnerable to a new virus or form of attack. Thus, the use of outdated anti-virus and anti-spyware files provides minimal protection, at best, for defense of computer data against outside threats. Consequently, a drawback of these products is that the information used by the anti-virus and anti-spyware program must be constantly updated to reflect newly discovered schemes. In addition to keeping the virus information current, the system must be periodically scanned for potential infections.
Firewall software provides an additional line of defense available to a user. Firewall software is installed on the user's computer (personal or corporate Firewall) to alert a user if a program in the user's computer is accessing the network without the user's knowledge or assent. However, if a Trojan compromises an authorized program and port, then the Firewall allows the Trojan to transmit data through the port.
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the basic communication protocol of the Internet and some private networks. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a secure Internet communication protocol based on TCP/IP and which uses a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol to allow secure data transfer using encrypted data streams. The primary purpose of HTTPS is to fetch hypertext objects from remote hosts, e.g., web pages, in a secure way. The SSL protocol allows clients, including web browsers and HTTP servers, to communicate over a secure connection. SSL offers encryption, source authentication, and data integrity as a means for protecting information exchanged over insecure, public networks. Many E-commerce applications use these protocols for securing transmissions between the server and the Internet.
Another drawback of known systems is their dependency, to a varying degree, upon a human to maintain their state of security. As described above, a user's information and/or system can be compromised despite taking security precautions. Other known methods to address identity theft include requiring a user to use a “token” or to keep a digital certificate on the user's system for use in authentication during a login process. A token is typically a credit card or key fob-sized authentication device required in order to access a service provider's system. The token usually displays numbers that change over time and synchronizes with an authentication server on the network. The token may also use a challenge/response scheme with the server. This method requires the user to have the token and enter information from the token for authentication in addition to a password and/or personal identification number (PIN). A problem with tokens is that the user must keep the token secure in addition to keeping the required password and/or pin secure. Also, customer support costs associated with lost or damaged tokens create additional problems. What is therefore also needed is a system and method for preventing identity theft that does not require costly hardware devices to be created and maintained in order to provide security for confidential information.